Improve Your Foresight
Project managers need foresight to anticipate potential issues and handle project curveballs. Developing foresight takes time so here are five tips to help you expand your foresight.
- Learn from the past. Most organizations keep project files but few people ever look at them. Take time to study previous projects in your organization, successful and unsuccessful alike. Look for trends and patterns. Find out why things went astray. Figure out whether risks were predicted and how they were dealt with. Lessons learned documents are a gold mine for developing foresight, but only if you read them!
- Talk with project stakeholders. Rarely does everyone related to a project have the same perspective. Talk to stakeholders about the goals, benefits, shortcomings, and other stressors that came from the projects they were involved in. Listen carefully and be ready for criticism. Not only will these discussions help build your foresight – you will solidify key relationships that make it easier to share truth and increase your ability to make your project stakeholders happy.
- Review plans and question assumptions. Be prepared to examine, question, and edit your project plans multiple times. Many projects fail because the initial plans weren’t analyzed and adjusted. Question anything that is new or appears to have come from guesswork or assumptions. Test assumptions for feasibility and add tasks to your plans to confirm those assumptions. These activities help ensure you create achievable plans.
- Consider alternative scenarios. When asking for estimates from your team members, use the Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT). Don’t just ask for a single estimate. Ask for optimistic, most likely, and pessimistic estimates. Talk with your estimators about those three estimates and what thinking when into them. You’ll learn more about the challenges your team members might face. This can significantly increase your foresight and help you predict issues before they occur.
- Never stop learning. Sign up for courses. Obtain certifications, follow industry experts online, and attend conferences. The more you deliberately expand your knowledge, the better you can envision the road ahead rather than just reacting as your projects progress.
How good is your foresight? What experiences in your past helped you build your foresight? Share with us in the comments section.
_______________________________________
This article belongs to the Bonnie’s Project Pointers newsletter series, which has more than 60,000 subscribers. This newsletter is 100% written by a human (no aliens or AIs involved). If you like this article, you can subscribe to receive notifications when a new article posts.
Want to learn more about the topics I talk about in these newsletters? Watch my courses in the LinkedIn Learning Library and tune into my LinkedIn Office Hours live broadcasts.